Doubling Market Presence Through Strategic Growth

Bonding Two Distinct Product Lines

Gorilla Glue is the premier adhesive and tape brand in the marketplace today, with distribution in every major retailer across North America. The Gorilla Glue Company stands behind its high-quality products and will only put its logo on items that meet its incredibly rigorous development standards. It also owns O’Keeffe’s Company, which specializes in making premium therapeutic products for the entire body.

Securing a Strategic Partnership

We’ve been working with Gorilla Glue and O’Keeffe’s since late 2015, following a discussion about both brands’ incredible marketplace presence and the growth opportunities at Target. Recognizing the extent to which they were underindexed, we outlined our clear vision of how, together, we could identify and combine key elements to strategically grow the two brands using our deep knowledge of the Target market.

Targeting New Divisions and Product Placements

With O’Keeffe’s, we started by highlighting how Target was struggling to understand the brand’s ideal place given the diversity of its offerings. After intense planning and preparation, we narrowed our focus to O’Keeffe’s therapeutic skincare products and demonstrated to Target how pivotal the brand was to its assortment. That effort quickly gained O’Keeffe’s a greater distribution in the space throughout the fall and winter of 2016. In the wake of that success, Target now leans on the brand for secondary space opportunities, both sidecap and checklane, appreciating how it drives the category share.

For Gorilla Glue, we realized that it would never thrive in the hardware space, which was limited due to the lack of resources that department receives. We saw a clear path for growth—as long as we could expand Gorilla Glue beyond home repair. Our bullseye? The crafting area within Target’s stationery division. We presented the story of the brand’s incredible marketing efforts over the past year and the resulting explosion in consumer awareness and conversion. In addition, we showed Target the incremental growth the brand has produced for Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and other retailers that position its products in multiple areas. Target agreed with our approach, adding several Gorilla Glue items to the crafting assortment for 2018.

The Results

Gorilla Glue and O’Keeffe’s have now more than doubled their business at Target, growing into an integral partner with presence in five separate departments across the store.